Red Hat Ascends Linux Summit as Linux 3.5 Release Approaches

Red Hat Ascends Linux Summit as Linux 3.5 Release Approaches

July 2, 2012

At $1 billion dollars in annual revenue, Red Hat is the undisputed financial leader of the pure play Linux world. They aren't however the only show in town, well actually they are, if the town is Boston and it's Red Hat Summit time.

1) Red Hat Summit

Red Hat's annual user event was held last week in Boston, with no shortage of news supporting the conference.

At the high level, Red Hat announced new IT and DevOps versions of its OpenShift PaaS service. With the new offerings, the Linux vendor is aiming to enable a hybrid cloud modality where developing and deploying to the cloud is part of everyday operations.

Red Hat also formally announced its first official storage release with Red Hat Storage 2.0. The new storage platform is based on the open source Gluster 3.3 release and adds in additional management and enterprise hardening.

During the event, Red Hat staffers also provided an update on where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is headed. The next big version of Red Hat's flagship platform will include the Btrfs filesystem as one of its primary system, a change from the current RHEL 6.x where Btfs remains in tech preview.

Product news wasn't the only thing going on at Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst also took the time to deliver a visionary keynoteabout - nuts and bolts. Whitehurst drew the comparison between the invention of the auto-lathe in 1810 and the cloud. Prior to the auto-lathe, which enables the manufacture of standard sized nuts and bolts, there were no standardized nuts and bolts. Once those building blocks were standardized, planes, trains and automobiles followed. In Whitehurst's view the cloud will do the same thing for computing.

"60 years after the invention of the computer we are now finally getting to standardized piece parts, what I'd call cloud computing," Whitehurst said.

2) Linux Kernel rc 5

While Red Hat was touting its successes, Linus Torvalds was busy (as always) adding to his own legendary success. This past week, Torvalds issued the fifth release candidate for Linux 3.5

Work on the Linux 3.5 kernel comes on the heels of the Linux 3.4 release back in May.

3) Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2.

Work also continues among Ubuntu developers, who last week pushed out the second milestone (alpha 2) of Ubuntu 12.10 the Quantal Quetzal.

It's still very early days for Ubuntu 12.10. The third alpha is set for August second and the first beta is currently expected to drop on September the sixth. Final release is currently scheduled for October 18th.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.